Louden said, "What you experienced was an illusion, Paula, a phantom generated by a short-circuiting lobe of your brain. There’s a doctor in Canada who can trigger these presences with a helmet and magnetic fields, for crying out loud. Your ... God wasn’t real. Your certainty was a symptom."
"Take me off these meds," she said, "or so help me I’ll wrap this IV tube around your fucking neck."
"This is a disease, Paula. Some of you are seeing Jesus, but we’ve got other patients seeing demons and angels, talking to ghosts—I’ve got one Hindu guy who’s sharing the bed with Lord Krishna."
She twisted against the cuffs, pain spiking across her shoulders. Her jaw ached from clenching her teeth.
"Paula, I need you to calm down. Your husband and daughter are downstairs. They want to visit you before you leave here."
"What? No. No." They couldn’t see her like this. It would confirm everything Richard ever thought about her. And Claire ... She was 13, a girl unfolding into a woman. The last thing she needed was to have her life distorted by this moment. By another vivid image of her mother as a raving lunatic.
"Tell them to stay away from me. The woman they knew doesn’t exist anymore."
This morning the detectives had emptied her bag and splayed the driver’s licenses and social security IDs like a deck of cards. How long has this been going on? they demanded. How many people are involved?
They gave her a pencil and yellow legal pad, told her to write down all the names she could remember. She stared at the tip of the pencil. An epidemiology book she’d read tried to explain crystallization by talking about how carbon could become graphite or diamond depending on how the atoms were arranged. The shapes she made on the page could doom a score of her missionaries.
She didn’t know what to do. She turned to her companion but he was silent, already disintegrating.
"You’re too late," she told the detectives. She snapped the pencil in half and threw it at them, bits of malformed diamond. "Six months too late."
They called themselves missionaries. Paula thought the name fit. They had a mission, and they would become agents of transmission.
The first and last meeting included only eighteen women. Paula had first convinced Tonya and Rosa from the yellow house, and they had widened the circle to a handful of women from houses around Philly, and from there they persuaded a few more women from New York and New Jersey. Paula had met some of them at Merilee’s feast, but most were strangers. Some, like Tonya, were mothers of sons, but all of them had become convinced that it was time to take the gospel into the world.
They met at a Denny’s restaurant in the western suburbs, where Steph and the other women wouldn’t see them.
"The host is not a virus," Paula said. "It’s not bacterial. It can’t be detected or filtered out the way other diseases are, it can’t be killed by antibiotics or detergents, because it’s nothing but a shape." A piece of paper can become a sailboat or swan, she told them. A simple protein, folded and copied a million times, could bring you Kuru, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or salvation.
"The body of Christ is powerful," Paula said. They knew: all of them had taken part in feasts and had been saved through them. "But there’s also power in the blood." She dealt out the driver licenses, two to each woman. Rosa’s old contacts had made them for fifty bucks apiece. "One of these is all you need to donate. We’re working on getting more. With four IDs you can give blood twice a month."
She told them how to answer the Red Cross surveys, which iron supplements to buy, which foods they should bulk up on to avoid anemia. They talked about secrecy. Most of the other women they lived with were too bound by tradition to see that they were only half doing God’s work.
Women like Steph. Paula had argued with her a dozen times over the months, but could not convince her. Paula loved Steph, and owed so much to her, but she couldn’t sit idly by any longer.
"We have to donate as often as possible," Paula said. "We have to spread the host so far and so fast that they can’t stop us by rounding us up." The incubation time depended directly on the amount consumed, so the more that was in the blood supply the faster the conversions would occur. Paula’s conversion had taken months. For others it might be years.
"But once they’re exposed to the host the conversion will happen," Paula said. "It can’t be stopped. One seed crystal can transform the ocean."
She could feel them with her. They could see the shape of the new world.
The women would never again meet all together like this—too dangerous—but they didn’t need to. They’d already become a church within the church.
Paula hugged each of them as they left the restaurant. "Go," she told them. "Multiply."
The visitor seemed familiar. Paula tilted her head to see through the bars as the woman walked toward the cell. It had become too much of a bother to lift Paula out of the bed and wheel her down to the conference room, so now the visitors came to her. Doctors and lawyers, always and only doctors and lawyers. This woman, though, didn’t look like either.
"Hello, Paula," she said. "It’s Esther Wynne. Do you remember me?"
"Ah." The memory came back to her, those first days in the hospital. The Christian woman. Of course she’d be Paula’s first voluntary visitor. "Hello, Esther." She struggled to enunciate clearly. In the year since they’d seen each other, Paula’s condition had worsened. Lips and jaw and arms refused to obey her, shaking and jerking to private commands. Her arm lay curled against her chest like Merilee’s. Her spine bent her nearly in half, so that she had to lie on her side. "You look—" She made a sound like a laugh, a hiccupping gasp forced from her chest by an unruly diaphragm. "—good."
The guard positioned a chair in front of the bars and the older woman sat down. Her hair was curled and sprayed. Under the makeup her skin looked healthy.
"I’ve been worried about you," Esther said. "Are they treating you well?"
Paula almost smiled. "As well as you can treat a mass murderer."
Some facts never escaped her. The missionaries had spread the disease to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. But more damaging, they’d completely corrupted the blood supply. New prion filters were now on the market, but millions of gallons of blood had to be destroyed. They told her she may be ultimately responsible for the deaths of a million people.
Paula gave them every name she could remember, and the FBI tracked down all of the original 18, but by then the mission could go on without them. A day after the meeting in the restaurant they’d begun to recruit others, women and men Paula would never meet, whose names would never be spoken to her. The church would continue. In secret now, hunted by the FBI and the CDC and the world’s governments, but growing every day. The host was passed needle by needle in private ceremonies, but increasingly on a mass scale as well. In an Ohio dairy processing plant, a man had been caught mixing his blood into the vats of milk. In Florida, police arrested a woman for injecting blood into the skulls of chickens. The economic damage was already in the trillions. The emotional toll on the public, in panic and paranoia, was incalculable.
Esther looked around at the cell. "You don’t have anything in there with you. Can I bring you books? Magazines? They told me they’d allow reading material. I thought maybe—"
"I don’t want anything," Paula said. She couldn’t hold her head steady enough to read. She watched TV to remind herself every day of what she’d done to the world. Outside the prison, a hundred jubilant protestors had built a tent city. They sang hymns and chanted for her release, and every day a hundred counter-protestors showed up to scream threats, throw rocks, and chant for her death. Police in riot gear made daily arrests.
Esther frowned. "I thought maybe you’d like a Bible."
Now Paula laughed for real. "What are you doing here, Esther? I see that look in your eye, you think I don’t recognize it?" Paula twisted, pressed herself higher on one elbow. Esther had never been infected by the host—they wouldn’t have let her in here if she
didn’t pass the screening—but her strain of the disease was just as virulent. "Did your Jesus tell you to come here?"
"I suppose in a way he did." The woman didn’t seem flustered. Paula found that annoying.
Esther said, "You don’t have to go through this alone. Even here, even after all you’ve done, God will forgive you. He can be here for you, if you want him."
Paula stared at her. If I want him. She never stopped craving him. He’d carved out a place for himself, dug a warren through the cells in her brain, until he’d erased even himself. She no longer needed pharmaceuticals to suppress him. He’d left behind a jagged Christ-shaped hole, a darkness with teeth.
She wanted him more than drugs, more than alcohol, more than Richard or Claire. She thought she’d known loneliness, but the past months had taught her new depths. Nothing would feel better than to surrender to a new god, let herself be wrapped again in loving arms.
Esther stood and leaned close to the bars so that their faces were only a couple feet apart. "Paula, if you died right now, do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’d go to heaven?" The guard told her to step back but she ignored him. She pushed one arm through the bars. "If you want to accept him, take my hand. Reach out."
"Oh, Esther, the last—" Her upper lip pulled back over her gums. "—last thing I want is to live forever." She fell back against the bed, tucked her working arm to her chest.
A million people.
There were acts beyond forgiveness. There were debts that had to be paid in person.
"Not hiding anymore," Paula said. She shook her head. "No gods, no drugs. The only thing I need to do now—"
She laughed, but it was an involuntary spasm, joyless. She waited a moment until it passed, and breathed deep. "I need to die clean."
The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm
The 22nd Invasion of Trovenia began with a streak of scarlet against a gray sky fast as the flick of a paintbrush. The red blur zipped across the length of the island, moving west to east, and shot out to sea. The sonic boom a moment later scattered the birds that wheeled above the fish processing plant and sent them squealing and plummeting.
Elena said, "Was that—it was, wasn’t it?"
"You’ve never seen a U-Man, Elena?" Jürgo said.
"Not in person." At nineteen, Elena Pendareva was the youngest of the crew by at least two decades, and the only female. She and the other five members of the heavy plate welding unit were perched 110 meters in the air, taking their lunch upon the great steel shoulder of the Slaybot Prime. The giant robot, latest in a long series of ultimate weapons, was unfinished, its unpainted skin speckled with bird shit, its chest turrets empty, the open dome of its head covered only by a tarp.
It had been Jürgo’s idea to ride up the gantry for lunch. They had plenty of time: for the fifth day in a row, steel plate for the Slaybot’s skin had failed to arrive from the foundry, and the welding crew had nothing to do but clean their equipment and play cards until the guards let them go home.
It was a good day for a picnic. An unseasonably warm spring wind blew in from the docks, carrying the smell of the sea only slightly tainted by odors of diesel fuel and fish guts. From the giant’s shoulder the crew looked down on the entire capital, from the port and industrial sector below them, to the old city in the west and the rows of gray apartment buildings rising up beyond. The only structures higher than their perch were Castle Grimm’s black spires, carved out of the sides of Mount Kriegstahl, and the peak of the mountain itself.
"You know what you must do, Elena," Verner said with mock sincerity. He was the oldest in the group, a veteran mechaneer whose body was more metal than flesh. "Your first übermensch, you must make a wish."
Elena said, "Is ‘Oh shit,’ a wish?"
Verner pivoted on his rubber-tipped stump to follow her gaze. The figure in red had turned about over the eastern sea, and was streaking back toward the island. Sunlight glinted on something long and metallic in its hands.
The UM dove straight toward them.
There was nowhere to hide. The crew sat on a naked shelf of metal between the gantry and the sheer profile of the robot’s head. Elena threw herself flat and spread her arms on the metal surface, willing herself to stick.
Nobody else moved. Maybe because they were old men, or maybe because they were all veterans, former zoomandos and mechaneers and castle guards. They’d seen dozens of U-Men, fought them even. Elena didn’t know if they were unafraid or simply too old to care much for their skin.
The UM shot past with a whoosh, making the steel shiver beneath her. She looked up in time to take in a flash of metal, a crimson cape, black boots—and then the figure crashed through the wall of Castle Grimm. Masonry and dust exploded into the air.
"Lunch break," Jürgo said in his Estonian accent, "is over."
Toolboxes slammed, paper sacks took to the wind. Elena got to her feet. Jürgo picked up his lunch pail with one clawed foot, spread his patchy, soot-stained wings, and leaned over the side, considering. His arms and neck were skinny as always, but in the past few years he’d grown a beer gut.
Elena said, "Jürgo, can you still fly?"
"Of course," he said. He hooked his pail to his belt and backed away from the edge. "However, I don’t believe I’m authorized for this air space."
The rest of the crew had already crowded into the gantry elevator. Elena and Jürgo pressed inside and the cage began to slowly descend, rattling and shrieking.
"What’s it about this time, you think?" Verner said, clockwork lungs wheezing. "Old Rivet Head kidnap one of their women?" Only the oldest veterans could get away with insulting Lord Grimm in mixed company. Verner had survived at least four invasions that she knew of. His loyalty to Trovenia was assumed to go beyond patriotism into something like ownership.
Guntis, a gray, pebble-skinned amphibian of Latvian descent, said, "I fought this girlie with a sword once, Energy Lady—"
"Power Woman," Elena said in English. She’d read the Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm to her little brother dozens of times before he learned to read it himself. The Lord’s most significant adversaries were all listed in the appendix, in multiple languages.
"That’s the one, Par-wer Woh-man," Guntis said, imitating her. "She had enormous—"
"Abilities," Jürgo said pointedly. Jürgo had been a friend of Elena’s father, and often played the protective uncle.
"I think he meant to say ‘tits’," Elena said. Several of the men laughed.
"No! Jürgo is right," Guntis said. "They were more than breasts. They had abilities. I think one of them spoke to me."
The elevator clanged down on the concrete pad and the crew followed Jürgo into the long shed of the 3000 line. The factory floor was emptying. Workers pulled on coats, joking and laughing as if it were a holiday.
Jürgo pulled aside a man and asked him what was going on. "The guards have run away!" the man said happily. "Off to fight the übermensch!"
"So what’s it going to be, boss?" Guntis said. "Stay or go?"
Jürgo scratched at the cement floor, thinking. Half-assembled Slaybot 3000s, five-meter-tall cousins to the colossal Prime, dangled from hooks all along the assembly line, wires spilling from their chests, legs missing. The factory was well behind its quota for the month. As well as for the quarter, year, and five-year mark. Circuit boards and batteries were in particularly short supply, but tools and equipment vanished daily. Especially scarce were acetylene tanks, a home-heating accessory for the very cold, the very stupid, or both.
Jürgo finally shook his feathered head and said, "Nothing we can do here. Let’s go home and hide under our beds."
"And in our bottles," Verner said.
Elena waved good-bye and walked toward the women’s changing rooms to empty her locker.
A block from her apartment she heard Mr. Bojars singing out, "Guh-RATE day for sausa-JEZ! Izza GREAT day for SAW-sages!" The mechaneer veteran was parked at his permanent spot at the corner of Glorio
us Victory Street and Infinite Progress Avenue, in the shadow of the statue of Grimm Triumphant. He saw her crossing the intersection and shouted, "My beautiful Elena! A fat bratwurst to go with that bread, maybe. Perfect for a celebration!"
"No thank you, Mr. Bojars." She hoisted the bag of groceries onto her hip and shuffled the welder’s helmet to her other arm. "You know we’ve been invaded, don’t you?"
The man laughed heartily. "The trap is sprung! The crab is in the basket!" He wore the same clothes he wore every day, a black nylon ski hat and a green, grease-stained parka decorated at the breast with three medals from his years in the motorized cavalry. The coat hung down to cover where his flesh ended and his motorcycle body began.
"Don’t you worry about Lord Grimm," he said. "He can handle any American muscle-head stupid enough to enter his lair. Especially the Red Meteor."
"It was Most Excellent Man," Elena said, using the Trovenian translation of his name. "I saw the Staff of Mightiness in his hand, or whatever he calls it."
"Even better! The man’s an idiot. A U-Moron."
"He’s defeated Lord Grimm several times," Elena said. "So I hear."
"And Lord Grimm has been declared dead a dozen times! You can’t believe the underground newspapers, Elena. You’re not reading that trash are you?"
"You know I’m not political, Mr. Bojars."
"Good for you. This Excellent Man, let me tell you something about—yes sir? Great day for a sausage." He turned his attention to the customer and Elena quickly wished him luck and slipped away before he could begin another story.
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